The Wisdom to Know the Difference
by Alchemine
Summary: Coraline has learned that just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should.


**Author's Note: **This story was originally written for Demoerin in the 2009 Yuletide Treasure exchange, and is based both on the book by Neil Gaiman and the 2009 film from Focus Features. No copyright infringement is intended and no profit is being made.

---

"I wish we could have an adventure," Wybie said. Sitting on the ground at the bottom of the steps, with his knees drawn up and his new black coat humped over his back, he looked like an exotic species of toadstool. He had a knobbly stick, picked up on their walk, which he used to gouge at the damp earth as he spoke.

Coraline wondered when boys grew out of wanting to dig things up. Apparently it wasn't when they were thirteen.

"What sort of adventure?" she asked.

"I dunno." He poked a deep hole in the dirt. "An exciting one. Like before."

Coraline rolled her eyes and leant over his shoulder to take the stick out of his hand. "You only think it was exciting because you weren't in it, except at the end. It was interesting and beautiful at first, but then it was just scary."

"I don't mind scary," Wybie said. "I only ever stayed out of your building because my grandma said. I could have gone in any time. If I'd wanted to," he added hastily, "which I didn't."

"The other Wybie went into the other building," Coraline pointed out, "and look at what happened to him."

"I'm lots tougher than he was," Wybie said. "I'd never let anyone sew my mouth shut, for starters."

"Hmmm," said Coraline. She looked out at the foggy expanse stretching below them, with trees and rocks and cars jutting out of it at irregular intervals, like shipwrecks in a sea of mist. 

_I could_ -- she thought, and then shoved that thought away before it could turn into a full-fledged idea.

"Who cares about stuff that happened a long time ago?" she said, and jumped up. "Come on, _Wyyyyy_bourne. I'll race you to the tennis court."

"Bet I beat you, _Jonesy_," said Wybie. He heaved himself to his feet and snatched his stick back from her.

"Bet you don't," Coraline said, and tore off down the hill, into the fog.

---

"Have you finished your homework?" Coraline's mother asked, without turning around from the sink.

"Mostly," said Coraline.

"Are you wearing your muddy shoes in the house?"

"No," said Coraline, looking down at her wet school socks against the yellowing linoleum. She wiggled her toes and the socks made _squish squish_ noises. A small puddle formed around her feet.

"Good," said her mother. "You'll be happy to hear that I asked your father to pick up a pizza on his way home. The afternoon got away from me somehow - I'm only just washing up the dishes from lunch."

"Okay," said Coraline. "Mum?"

"Yes?" "Could you turn around, please?"

"Why?" her mother asked, but she turned, hands dripping with water, and faced Coraline, who breathed out a small, quiet sigh of relief at the sight of her mother's familiar hazel eyes. Even after two years, she sometimes still liked to reassure herself that her mother was really her mother.

"No reason," Coraline said.

Her mother shook her head, but she laughed a little too. "Silly girl. Go finish your work now. Your father will be home in half an hour, and we're eating as soon as he gets in."

Coraline went down the hall to her bedroom, leaving the sounds of running water and rattling plates behind her, and shut the door. In their cage, her two white mice woke up with a rustle of cedar shavings and came close to the bars, whiskers twitching.

"Hello, mice," Coraline said. The mice blinked at her sleepily, but did not so much as squeak in reply.

Coraline took off her wet socks and draped them over the edge of her desk to dry. The mice were her pets, but she felt a bit strange whenever she was around them. Mr. Bobinski from upstairs had given them to her as a present last autumn, and the next morning, he had been gone, his flat empty except for a crumpled handbill advertising the mouse circus, and a lot of sticky cobwebs that had made Coraline shudder.

"Theatrical people are like that," her mother had said, when Coraline reported that Mr. Bobinski had gone. "You never know when they'll decide to pack up and leave. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible could be gone tomorrow as well."

Coraline had said nothing. Instead, she had gone to her bedroom and looked at the white mice, and wondered. They were trained mice - she recognized them from the circus, which Mr. Bobinski had shown her many times - but here in her flat, they wouldn't do their tricks or even run in their wheel. They would only stare at her with their pink eyes, twisting their nervous delicate paws together, whispering words and singing snatches of songs that she couldn't quite make out.

She thought perhaps Mr. Bobinski had intended for them to watch her. She kept them in case she needed to be watched. Because of how she had changed. Because of what she could do.

It had almost seemed like a dream at first: she'd been lying awake one night not long after the well incident, listening to the reassuring sound of her father snoring down the hall, and wishing she had something to do instead of just staring into the dark. _Suppose I could have a garden in my bedroom, like the one we planted outside? _she'd thought, and suddenly there _had_ been a garden there, or at least the faint ghost-image of one, with luminous flowers and twining vines crawling across the wall. She'd nearly fallen out of bed trying to reach them and touch them, but they had gone before she could get there.

Coraline had had a moment of pure terror then, looking round for the skittering long-nailed hand, for the other mother's tall, thin shape, but there'd been nothing. Slowly, as she relaxed, she'd realized that the flowers had appeared when she imagined them. Could she be the one who had done it? And if so, what else could she do?

It had turned out that she could do quite a lot. Every night after that, she'd lain in bed, imagining impossibly tall mountains, fantastic animals, stars and planets, and as she'd envisioned them, they'd appeared, splashed across the walls of her bedroom, so real you thought you could walk into them. They were only pictures, but with time, she'd known she could give them shape and substance. She could build them up into entire worlds.

Right there, with that thought, was where Coraline had got frightened and stopped. She didn't know how she'd acquired this power - if she'd brought it back from the other house with her, or if she'd stolen it somehow when she outwitted the other mother's hand - but she knew where it had come from. Worse, she knew it was even stronger in her than it had been in the other mother, who had only been able to make copies of real things. Creating anything from imagination, whatever sort of sick and twisted thing had passed for her imagination, had been beyond the other mother's abilities.

But it wasn't beyond Coraline's.

It had occurred to Coraline at that point that maybe she wasn't the real Coraline after all. Maybe the real Coraline had never crawled back through the passageway and into the parlor. Maybe that Coraline had been lost, and she was another Coraline altogether, one that had split off somewhere between there and here. When she was in the other world, she'd been certain there was only one of her, but how could she ever really know for sure? She'd nearly made herself sick thinking about it.

Since then she hadn't messed about with the pictures at all. It seemed safer that way. She wouldn't have thought about them at all (except a bit, perhaps, when she was alone in bed at night) if Wybie hadn't kept tempting her, unknowingly, with his wishes for adventure. Surely it wouldn't be so bad to create another world if you were really doing it for someone else's pleasure, would it? Just one little world, just one adventure for she and Wybie, the real Wybie, to share. One adventure that she could control, where no one would get hurt, and then she'd pull it all down, like ripping old paper off a wall, and never ever do it again. She even knew the right place, in Mr. Bobinski's abandoned flat --

No, she thought. That was wrong. Once you started down that path, you wouldn't want to stop; you'd want to create more worlds; better, more perfect worlds. You'd get used to being in charge, until you thought you could do whatever you liked, whenever you liked; until you became just like the other mother. And that was one thing Coraline Jones never wanted to be.

The bedroom door creaked - a small, stealthy sound - and Coraline turned, suddenly icy to the bone.

"Oh, it's you," she said to the black cat. "How do you keep getting in, anyway?"

The cat looked up at her, and she could almost hear its voice in her head, rich and deep, saying, _Wouldn't you like to know?_ It padded across the floor and leapt onto her bed, and she sat down beside it and stroked its sleek head. Its ears twitched, but it didn't move away. In the cage, the mice prudently burrowed under their cedar shavings and hid.

"I wanted things to be ordinary again," Coraline said to the cat. "They always were before we came here. Ordinary and boring and safe. But nothing will ever really be that way again no matter where I go, will it? Because I'm different now."

The cat blinked its green eyes at her, almost in slow motion. Coraline was used to this. She went on.

"I could give Wybie what he wants," she said. "He's my friend, you know, even though we fight sometimes. He might even be more than my friend one day, maybe, when he gets interested in more than mud and crawly things."

The cat heaved a sigh and put its chin down on its paws in preparation for a nap. Leaving it on the bed, Coraline went to her window and pulled the curtain aside so she could look out. Her mother had insisted on pink curtains with delicate flowers embroidered on them, and Coraline, who normally despised all things pink on principle, had gone along with it. They were only curtains, after all.

She leant forward until her breath made a cloud on the cool window glass. Down below, she saw Wybie, not yet called home by his grandmother, still mooching around on his own in the dissipating fog. Picking up stones, poking at logs with his stick, looking for bugs and worms. Dreaming of new things; of strange and wonderful and scary adventures.

_I could_, she thought, _but I won't. For your own good, Wybie. Because I love you._


End file.
